>... Charade... a lawyer forgot to renew the copyright on.
Not exactly. "Charade", and other films, are more likely to be out of copyright (in the US) because they were performed publicly without the copyright notices that were mandatory in the US prior to 1989. "Night of the Living Dead" comes to mind as a second example.
Sorry if you knew this and were intentionally simplifying to make your post more cogent.
Looks like these guys have taken up the gauntlet which Loki had to relinquish... I wish them luck. I'd buy from them, but frankly, I'm trying to give up gaming rather than looking for new games...
This is the first time I try to post from "elinks" so please excuse any mishaps...
Firstly, I personally also agree that the second mathematician is not absolved from citing the first one even if society as a whole benefits from his transgression.
Secondly, I'd like to emphasize the other issue from my first post, which is that there is quite a bit of politics behind the supposedly objective scientific process. From another academic, I've heard stories of current biological research which didn't get published in a particular journal (with the best exposure, etc.), and the scientist involved claimed it was because the editor of that journal runs a lab which is "pushing" an opposing scientific viewpoint. This new forum for unreviewed results seems to be a way to try to counteract these types of abuses (especially if there would be several such forums run by different organizations).
Reality is a little more complex than that. Even though the following story doesn't match the scenario which you are talking about, where someone steals the current work of an active academic, I think it brings up other issues which you ignore.
I know of a case where a Russian mathematician published an original result in Russian but then left academia and his result got little publicity, except in Russia. Many years later, a German mathematician (who is known to be able to read Russian) "rediscovered" and republished the first mathematician's work without giving him credit (obviously, since the second mathematician really did not add anything of significance, and in fact, didn't even change the original notation much). The mathematical discovery in question has therefore become much more well-known in the mathematics world (since the second mathematician is in academia, so he is constantly lecturing about it in conferences, and such).
The first mathematician (disclaimer: I know him personally and heard the story from him) is of course very upset about all of this, but claims to actually have very little recourse, because he is no longer an academic, and therefore has practically zero political power in the academic circles involved. He still has a few friends here and there, and found out about the story from one of them.
Now from the point of view of kiddie good/evil, it's clear that the second mathematician has sided with the "dark side" (if we believe the first mathematician's opinion, that the second one is merely stealing his results). But from a different point of view, by stealing the first mathematician's work and publicizing it (as his own) he may be doing society a favor by enabling a possibly significant result to gain more recognition (i.e., that might be worth more to society than the damage caused to society by the second mathematician getting more grant money, etc., than he actually deserves).
You have a good point, perhaps, but only in that the poster to whom you replied forgot to qualify his statements with "for $100-$200, and adapted to low availability of electric power"...
> isn't OpenDNS indirectly providing users with automatic anonymounization of my queries?
I suppose you meant "isn't OpenDNS indirectly providing users with automatic anonymization of their queries?"
Well, to some extent yes, but probably not for most, since most users will either have an identifying google.com cookie or be logged into Gmail or other Google services.
Frankly, I'd guess that the OLPC organization signs contracts with their customers (or customer nations, anyway) which resemble Microsoft's EULA's. In other words, the customer agrees to the fact that there is nothing resembling the support infrastructure which commercial companies supply.
Last time I read an EULA from Microsoft, it said that Microsoft had no obligation to patch any particular bugs which would be found in its software. Very similar to this situation.
The first takers for the OLPC are, in reality, beta testers, even if they are not officially. I don't find it particularly scandalous that there would be some problems with the hardware which only large scale use would uncover. I would think it unscrupulous if no action would be taken to fix the (major) problems which are discovered (that is, just as I would look at Microsoft leaving major known security vulnerabilities unpatched).
Can I at least blame *that* on Ubuntu? You know... vindicating 2 years of whining? There's only one thing which I'd say would vindicate our having to put up with your 2 years of whining: that you would get over it and stop whining about it. If you would do that, I, personally, would be willing, even happy, to forgive you for past whines.
Unfortunately, I'm sure not everyone here agrees with me, so I suggest you get a new Slashdot ID also.
All I was saying, in brief, was that it seems silly to me that people should be up in arms over OOXML becoming a standard We're not; as you astutely figured out, we'd be overjoyed if it would become a standard, or if Microsoft would make full disclosure of the Office 2007 file formats and other information necessary for interoperability. We're up in arms because ISO/IEC 29500 isn't even close to that. It's a partial disclosure masquerading as a standard. I'll bet you that the EU will look at this so-called "standard" and anyway require Microsoft to disclose additional information about its Office 2007 formats in the name of making real interoperability possible (to those who shell out the $$).
But I bet you'd be hard pressed to come up with a reason why it being a standard is a bad thing for anybody. The money of taxpayers around the world, in countries with laws requiring that governments only procure software which will producing "standard file formats", will now be spent on software which doesn't do what the public wanted. Good enough reason?
He didn't actually brick it. He just wasn't prepared to fix the MBR, i.e., didn't have Windows install disk or rescue disk or a live Linux distro ready. His brother helped him restore Windows on that computer, that time.
OOXML becoming a standard isn't about it becoming THE standard. It's been the de facto standard for quite some time already, challenged recently by newcomers to the field. Compare:
Let's see: you know how to write nice prose, no spelling or grammar mistakes, nicely formatted into paragraphs, and you blithely spew pro-Microsoft propaganda. Hmmm, why did my corporate shill meter just jump?
OOXML becoming a standard is a very good thing for anybody trying to make a program to edit documents with the intent of competing with Microsoft in the Office software space. That would be true except that Office 2007 doesn't actually write files in OOXML format. Don't you remember that there were thousands of comments on Microsoft's initial proposed standard and at least some of the comments were accepted? Unfortunately, Office 2007 hasn't been patched to conform, and Microsoft has not promised to make it conform to the updated standard.
I would imagine -- not having looked at the spec myself -- that there are very few complaints with the way current behavior is described. Guess again? Stephane Rodriguez: What is being shown is that in addition to missing documentation, the binary documentations sometimes conflict with the ECMA 376 documentation, itself not a full documentation of the new XML-based formats anyway.
The standardizing of OOXML means that there will be a standard way... I love the way you repeat "standard", "standard", "standard", in all its forms to the point it becomes a hypnotic mantra in the mind of all who read your comment. Really a jewel of corporate market-speak!
I personally like MS products... I'd just ask that those of you interpreting this as Microsoft's big play to become THE standard stop selling yourselves short. In general you're all much smarter than to legitimately be up in arms over something that fosters the very thing that you want due to a misunderstanding in semantics. Wow, I think you slipped! If I'm not mistaken, "due to a misunderstanding in semantics" actually modifies the nearest previous target, which would be the "something", so your last convoluted sentence actually means "You're too smart to oppose OOXML --- OOXML does what you want because there is a misunderstanding in semantics". But anyway, let me simplify reality for you: we're all much smarter than to swallow your bullshit.
>...is that a lot of Microsoft partners joined the process in order to vote in favour.
> Isn't that how it's supposed to work?
Well, yes, but only if Microsoft doesn't offer them special incentives to do so. If Microsoft is allowed to do that, the reliability of the vote as actually measuring how much the companies, or even national governments, as opposed to Microsoft, like or dislike the standard is highly questionable.
The anomaly which I pointed out in Sweden was that SSI admits that some of the member companies were promised incentives from Microsoft for voting for OOXML, but SSI didn't think that was important.
The reason that people complained about Microsoft partners was because they assumed that it would be even easier for Microsoft to surreptitiously "reward" those companies for voting for OOXML.
> So, foul play or sour grapes?
Well, no one really knows the full extent to which Microsoft manipulated the vote itself, so as a mathematician, I'd have to answer your question "yes".
However, everyone does know how many thousands of comments were raised against the standard, a large portion of which still remain untreated. And Microsoft is claimed to have declared that even if the standard passes after being amended to treat all those issues, it won't be updating Office 2007 to use the updated OOXML format. So, an awful lot of us are left thinking that Microsoft threw a lot of weight (and perhaps cash or other financial perks) around to get this standard through ISO just so software-procuring bureaucrats could point at the standard to claim that using Microsoft fulfills the requirements of any regulations or laws requiring standard file formats.
> fairly trivial to make secure.... do not allow anything to moved from the plug to the register
All I can say is, I hope you don't work in the computer security field.
How is the driver going to access the USB drive without transferring data from the plug? You do realize that the driver is going to need to read a lot of data about the state of the filesystem, right? System drivers, especially third-party ones, are well known to be weak points in the security of a lot of systems.
The Swedish Standards Institute has declared its recent vote in favor of Microsoft's Office Open XML format invalid. It means that Sweden will probably abstain from an important upcoming international vote on whether to make the format a standard.
The reason given by SIS was not the controversial circumstances surrounding the vote, in which Microsoft was found to have offered companies "incentives" if they voted in favor of OOXML. Instead, SIS cited a technicality, saying proper procedures had not been followed.
SSI more or less admits that MS swayed member companies votes and at the same time claims that was perfectly OK, but there was a technical problem somewhere else (a double vote).
Are the other official bodies you're talking about applying the same "standards" as SSI to their voting procedures? If so, you might be technically correct, but as far as I'm concerned, it still stinks.
The Wikipedia article on these robots (POV warning: it reads like an ad from the manufacturer), says that each one (of the weapon-equipped version, anyway) costs $230K. You'd think that at that price, it'd pay for organized crime from an advanced nation to figure out how to jam the transmission to/from the robot, and make away with a few.
Actually, even a good thick black net might be enough to disable the sensors on this thing. Or maybe use a large electromagnet attached to a pickup truck with a long enough cable?
OTOH, $230K is the cost to the army. It's probably worth less as stolen goods. If I know the Army, it's probably worth a lot less.
Even without "modifications" (as other replies suggest in this thread) to Law 1, they could be useful against other robots. Or, alternatively, they could be armed with some kind of advanced non-lethal weapons (bolos which immobilize arms and legs?).
> so many other people want to use the internet anonymously
But the vast majority of those people, unlike you, have no clue as to what that entails. They don't even know what an IP address is. I think you're very optimistic to rely on them to provide overwhelming demand or lobbying power to preserve what you want.
1) having websites which I want to look at be written according to accepted web standards, so they will display properly in all standards-compliant browsers
2) to not have to pay money to buy specific programs in order to open documents which people send me in proprietary formats
I guess you can ask 'em to send it in Acrobat... Yes, that works for docs, but IE-only websites in Acrobat?
... OpenOffice can save its documents in a standard, open file format, and it is free (as in beer), which lets people try it out without paying up front, and free (as in speech), which lets people pay for it in other ways than spending cash (more on that later in my post). So we all have to be programmers? Nope, didn't say that, you didn't bother to read the whole post even though I tried to make it clear to you that you should by saying "more on that later in my post". Where I list lots of ways to "pay" for OSS, only one of which being programming.
.... And then there are some of us who actually do click the "donate" button (if it is provided). Sure, if that's the way you want to operate, be my guest. I don't want to _have_ to operate that wway because the operating system only offers rograms that are set up that way. The reason you feel you _have_ to operate that way on Linux has very little to do with Linux itself, it is caused by closed-source software companies choosing not to support Linux, probably for the reason that relatively few people use Linux and of those who do, many would not buy software designed for it. If MS manages to screw up the version after Vista even worse, this might change...
Where I disagree with you is that I believe that there are many people who are willing to pay, but do not have the means to do so (in a significant public fashion, at least), and I strongly believe these people should still be able to use free software. OK, they don't want to get a job and just use free software, fine... I don't really care. I just don't want to _have_ to use it. What world do you live in? The people I'm talking about mainly do have jobs. Jobs which pay them monthly about what you would spend on your next game. There are millions of people like that in the world. And yes, a lot of them do have access to computers.
C'mon, you know I meant the downloading of music that is only meant to be for sale and such that to legally posses it, one should have purchased it with a portion of that money going to the artist who made the music and very much wants the compensation. I'm curious, what you feel is important here is that the artist (and record companies, etc.) get money? So you would agree it's OK for me to buy music with DRM and then download a non-DRM version for my personal use (as opposed to having to buy a second copy for my car, and an additional copy for every MP3 player, and not being able to listen to the same music under Linux)?
Slashdot Mirror
For a second when I clicked to expand your comment I was sure you'd end up claiming to be a (cut-and-pasted, or perhaps broken-) record store owner...
I'm right with you. We need to outlaw offering to distribute copyrighted works. That would be an interesting new world!
If I am not mistaken, the fact that the "a" tag includes rel="nofollow" means that the link destination won't get any extra Google-karma...
> ... Charade ... a lawyer forgot to renew the copyright on.
Not exactly. "Charade", and other films, are more likely to be out of copyright (in the US) because they were performed publicly without the copyright notices that were mandatory in the US prior to 1989. "Night of the Living Dead" comes to mind as a second example.
Sorry if you knew this and were intentionally simplifying to make your post more cogent.
Never fear, the power of Google is here!
Looks like these guys have taken up the gauntlet which Loki had to relinquish... I wish them luck. I'd buy from them, but frankly, I'm trying to give up gaming rather than looking for new games...
Check out the song "High School Reunion" by Jennifer Marks. She had it up on the original mp3.com ...
If she thought she was going to gain some fans by putting it up for free then, it worked, at least for me!
This is the first time I try to post from "elinks" so please excuse any mishaps...
Firstly, I personally also agree that the second mathematician is not absolved from citing the first one even if society as a whole benefits from his transgression.
Secondly, I'd like to emphasize the other issue from my first post, which is that there is quite a bit of politics behind the supposedly objective scientific process. From another academic, I've heard stories of current biological research which didn't get published in a particular journal (with the best exposure, etc.), and the scientist involved claimed it was because the editor of that journal runs a lab which is "pushing" an opposing scientific viewpoint. This new forum for unreviewed results seems to be a way to try to counteract these types of abuses (especially if there would be several such forums run by different organizations).
Reality is a little more complex than that. Even though the following story doesn't match the scenario which you are talking about, where someone steals the current work of an active academic, I think it brings up other issues which you ignore.
I know of a case where a Russian mathematician published an original result in Russian but then left academia and his result got little publicity, except in Russia. Many years later, a German mathematician (who is known to be able to read Russian) "rediscovered" and republished the first mathematician's work without giving him credit (obviously, since the second mathematician really did not add anything of significance, and in fact, didn't even change the original notation much). The mathematical discovery in question has therefore become much more well-known in the mathematics world (since the second mathematician is in academia, so he is constantly lecturing about it in conferences, and such).
The first mathematician (disclaimer: I know him personally and heard the story from him) is of course very upset about all of this, but claims to actually have very little recourse, because he is no longer an academic, and therefore has practically zero political power in the academic circles involved. He still has a few friends here and there, and found out about the story from one of them.
Now from the point of view of kiddie good/evil, it's clear that the second mathematician has sided with the "dark side" (if we believe the first mathematician's opinion, that the second one is merely stealing his results). But from a different point of view, by stealing the first mathematician's work and publicizing it (as his own) he may be doing society a favor by enabling a possibly significant result to gain more recognition (i.e., that might be worth more to society than the damage caused to society by the second mathematician getting more grant money, etc., than he actually deserves).
Wow, flamebait? Too bad I didn't use my karma bonus from the start...
What's funny is that I'm not sure if the moderator in question thought I was disparaging the OLPC or Microsoft!
You have a good point, perhaps, but only in that the poster to whom you replied forgot to qualify his statements with "for $100-$200, and adapted to low availability of electric power"...
> isn't OpenDNS indirectly providing users with automatic anonymounization of my queries?
I suppose you meant "isn't OpenDNS indirectly providing users with automatic anonymization of their queries?"
Well, to some extent yes, but probably not for most, since most users will either have an identifying google.com cookie or be logged into Gmail or other Google services.
Frankly, I'd guess that the OLPC organization signs contracts with their customers (or customer nations, anyway) which resemble Microsoft's EULA's. In other words, the customer agrees to the fact that there is nothing resembling the support infrastructure which commercial companies supply.
Last time I read an EULA from Microsoft, it said that Microsoft had no obligation to patch any particular bugs which would be found in its software. Very similar to this situation.
The first takers for the OLPC are, in reality, beta testers, even if they are not officially. I don't find it particularly scandalous that there would be some problems with the hardware which only large scale use would uncover. I would think it unscrupulous if no action would be taken to fix the (major) problems which are discovered (that is, just as I would look at Microsoft leaving major known security vulnerabilities unpatched).
Unfortunately, I'm sure not everyone here agrees with me, so I suggest you get a new Slashdot ID also.
He didn't actually brick it. He just wasn't prepared to fix the MBR, i.e., didn't have Windows install disk or rescue disk or a live Linux distro ready. His brother helped him restore Windows on that computer, that time.
He's trying to make an analogy to the tags similar in nature to "DoSomeFormattingLikeWord5" which exist (although deprecated) in OOXML.
- The first official ODF-TC meeting to discuss the standard was December 16, 2002; OASIS approved OpenDocument as an OASIS Standard on May 1, 2005.
- Microsoft Office 2007
... Formerly known as Office 12 in the initial stages of its beta cycle, it was released to volume license customers on November 30, 2006
Let's see: you know how to write nice prose, no spelling or grammar mistakes, nicely formatted into paragraphs, and you blithely spew pro-Microsoft propaganda. Hmmm, why did my corporate shill meter just jump? OOXML becoming a standard is a very good thing for anybody trying to make a program to edit documents with the intent of competing with Microsoft in the Office software space. That would be true except that Office 2007 doesn't actually write files in OOXML format. Don't you remember that there were thousands of comments on Microsoft's initial proposed standard and at least some of the comments were accepted? Unfortunately, Office 2007 hasn't been patched to conform, and Microsoft has not promised to make it conform to the updated standard. I would imagine -- not having looked at the spec myself -- that there are very few complaints with the way current behavior is described. Guess again? Stephane Rodriguez: What is being shown is that in addition to missing documentation, the binary documentations sometimes conflict with the ECMA 376 documentation, itself not a full documentation of the new XML-based formats anyway. The standardizing of OOXML means that there will be a standard way> ...is that a lot of Microsoft partners joined the process in order to vote in favour.
> Isn't that how it's supposed to work?
Well, yes, but only if Microsoft doesn't offer them special incentives to do so. If Microsoft is allowed to do that, the reliability of the vote as actually measuring how much the companies, or even national governments, as opposed to Microsoft, like or dislike the standard is highly questionable.
The anomaly which I pointed out in Sweden was that SSI admits that some of the member companies were promised incentives from Microsoft for voting for OOXML, but SSI didn't think that was important.
The reason that people complained about Microsoft partners was because they assumed that it would be even easier for Microsoft to surreptitiously "reward" those companies for voting for OOXML.
> So, foul play or sour grapes?
Well, no one really knows the full extent to which Microsoft manipulated the vote itself, so as a mathematician, I'd have to answer your question "yes".
However, everyone does know how many thousands of comments were raised against the standard, a large portion of which still remain untreated. And Microsoft is claimed to have declared that even if the standard passes after being amended to treat all those issues, it won't be updating Office 2007 to use the updated OOXML format. So, an awful lot of us are left thinking that Microsoft threw a lot of weight (and perhaps cash or other financial perks) around to get this standard through ISO just so software-procuring bureaucrats could point at the standard to claim that using Microsoft fulfills the requirements of any regulations or laws requiring standard file formats.
Now that I think about it, maybe that link isn't as connected as I thought... :(
:)
I was looking more for something like this.
Too bad I can't make that post disappear by moderating the thread.
> fairly trivial to make secure. ... do not allow anything to moved from the plug to the register
All I can say is, I hope you don't work in the computer security field.
How is the driver going to access the USB drive without transferring data from the plug? You do realize that the driver is going to need to read a lot of data about the state of the filesystem, right? System drivers, especially third-party ones, are well known to be weak points in the security of a lot of systems.
E.g., A Linux kernel vulnerability somewhat connected to this discussion.
Like the Swedish official body?
From http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/08/31/Sweden-OOXML-vote-invalid_1.html:SSI more or less admits that MS swayed member companies votes and at the same time claims that was perfectly OK, but there was a technical problem somewhere else (a double vote).
Are the other official bodies you're talking about applying the same "standards" as SSI to their voting procedures? If so, you might be technically correct, but as far as I'm concerned, it still stinks.
The Wikipedia article on these robots (POV warning: it reads like an ad from the manufacturer), says that each one (of the weapon-equipped version, anyway) costs $230K. You'd think that at that price, it'd pay for organized crime from an advanced nation to figure out how to jam the transmission to/from the robot, and make away with a few.
Actually, even a good thick black net might be enough to disable the sensors on this thing. Or maybe use a large electromagnet attached to a pickup truck with a long enough cable?
OTOH, $230K is the cost to the army. It's probably worth less as stolen goods. If I know the Army, it's probably worth a lot less.
Even without "modifications" (as other replies suggest in this thread) to Law 1, they could be useful against other robots. Or, alternatively, they could be armed with some kind of advanced non-lethal weapons (bolos which immobilize arms and legs?).
Not true in the US.
:(
Here's a US Treasury Dept. link from a comment I recently modded Informative:
http://www.ustreas.gov/education/faq/currency/legal-tender.shtml
I cannot find the comment now, Slashdot's search function is too under-powered
> so many other people want to use the internet anonymously
But the vast majority of those people, unlike you, have no clue as to what that entails. They don't even know what an IP address is. I think you're very optimistic to rely on them to provide overwhelming demand or lobbying power to preserve what you want.
...- 1) having websites which I want to look at be written according to accepted web standards, so they will display properly in all standards-compliant browsers
- 2) to not have to pay money to buy specific programs in order to open documents which people send me in proprietary formats
I guess you can ask 'em to send it in Acrobat... Yes, that works for docs, but IE-only websites in Acrobat?
... OpenOffice can save its documents in a standard, open file format, and it is free (as in beer), which lets people try it out without paying up front, and free (as in speech), which lets people pay for it in other ways than spending cash (more on that later in my post). So we all have to be programmers? Nope, didn't say that, you didn't bother to read the whole post even though I tried to make it clear to you that you should by saying "more on that later in my post". Where I list lots of ways to "pay" for OSS, only one of which being programming.
.... And then there are some of us who actually do click the "donate" button (if it is provided). Sure, if that's the way you want to operate, be my guest. I don't want to _have_ to operate that wway because the operating system only offers rograms that are set up that way. The reason you feel you _have_ to operate that way on Linux has very little to do with Linux itself, it is caused by closed-source software companies choosing not to support Linux, probably for the reason that relatively few people use Linux and of those who do, many would not buy software designed for it. If MS manages to screw up the version after Vista even worse, this might change... Where I disagree with you is that I believe that there are many people who are willing to pay, but do not have the means to do so (in a significant public fashion, at least), and I strongly believe these people should still be able to use free software. OK, they don't want to get a job and just use free software, fine... I don't really care. I just don't want to _have_ to use it. What world do you live in? The people I'm talking about mainly do have jobs. Jobs which pay them monthly about what you would spend on your next game. There are millions of people like that in the world. And yes, a lot of them do have access to computers. C'mon, you know I meant the downloading of music that is only meant to be for sale and such that to legally posses it, one should have purchased it with a portion of that money going to the artist who made the music and very much wants the compensation. I'm curious, what you feel is important here is that the artist (and record companies, etc.) get money? So you would agree it's OK for me to buy music with DRM and then download a non-DRM version for my personal use (as opposed to having to buy a second copy for my car, and an additional copy for every MP3 player, and not being able to listen to the same music under Linux)?